Born in 1941 in the Trench Town ghetto of Jamaica's capital, Kingston, Claudius Linton was among that particular slum's group of artistic musical pioneers. Trench Town was home to Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, two younger contemporaries of Claudius who became much more famous.
Their style of Roots Reggae has become the signature brand with which mainstream listeners are familiar, the reggae that follows the everyday occurrences of the singer.
Like the early days of rock music, when the lines between rock, doo-wop, bluegrass, and country were fluid and/or undefined, the early days of reggae were a petri dish of acoustic guitar, flowing bass lines, steel drums and horns. Today some of it is called ska, some is called rocksteady, and, of course, traditional reggae. Reggae is traditionally played slower than ska and rocksteady, and is characterized by the accenting of the off-beats (being a math guy I should understand that, but I don't know enough about music).
In any case, Claudius' first band that gained popularity in the early sixties was called the Angelic Brothers. A ska band, they had a few hits that can be heard on YouTube, namely "Ten Virgins" and "My Sunshine". In the later sixties he played with the Hofner Brothers, before striking out on his own.
Dubbed the Kingman, he was a lesser known hitmaker in the reggae field, and struck a large hit with his 1976 single "Crying Time". After a 1984 collaboration with producer Jack Ruby, he disappeared.
In 2007, on a beach in Jamaica, producer and indie rock musician Ian Jones (he uses the stage name Jonas) met a still-full-of-music Claudius. Out of their chance meeting came Jonas' Sun King Records remastered collection of the Kingman's greatest songs from the sixties and seventies, "Roots Master", in late 2007.
The Kingman's artistic renaissance was complete with his first new album in more than two decades, "Sign Time" by the duo Kingman and Jonah. The album was well received and well reviewed. The strengths of Claudius' roots reggae is as true as forty years prior, and the acoustic guitar flair brought by Jonas reminds people of the reggae protest songs from the era of protest songs. (It's about Iraq, but the message is the same.) Here is an article about the Kingman's renaissance.
After a falling out with Jonas, and some poor decision making, Claudius resurfaced in 2010 in Long Beach, living on the streets. He was in a long battle with diabetes, filmed a segment with the local paper, the Press-Telegram, and succumbed to his medical problems a few months later. Here is an article about Linton's passing, with the newspaper's video segment.
If being a popular guitar and singing attraction while living on the streets isn't too sad, and then dying on the streets of Long Beach isn't quite sad enough, then what happened after is the saddest part.
Unable to find next of kin, a friend from Long Beach applied for, and received, the legal rights to Claudius' remains. After working out a deal with a local mortuary for a discounted cremation (the mortician was also a fan and sympathetic to the cause), the Kingman was cremated.
His ashes? They remain in a box on the desk of the mortician. The friend has disappeared, hasn't paid the bill, and can't be located. The mortician wants to do right by Claudius, but has no legal ability to scatter the ashes, and doesn't know exactly where the best possible place could be. A friend from the street has claimed he knows where some of Claudius' family are in Jamaica, and that he can contact them, but this friend is also hard to find regularly.
The sad end for a proud artist, a rare link to the original Trench Town musicians, ashes in a box on a desk...
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